Corporate Report highlights the National Bank’ CSR efforts

The National Bank of Belgium is today publishing its annual Corporate Report. This year, it features for the first time a detailed chapter focusing on the efforts the Bank has made in the fields of a corporate social responsibility and inclusion.

Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, the year 2020 was not only eventful, but also brought a whole host of organisational challenges for the National Bank. The Corporate Report released today takes a detailed look at the many tasks that have been conferred on it with a view to tackling the economic fallout from the coronavirus crisis. It also sets out the strategic exercise which the Bank is currently working on so as to be able to take up the very many challenges thrown up by the rapid change in the economic and financial landscape. Given the wide diversity of the Bank’s missions, both in its role as a central bank and in its capacity as a member of the Eurosystem, the description of the work carried out by its various Departments and Services has been expanded considerably.

Click here for the National Bank’s Corporate Report 2020.

CSR

However, the main new feature of the Corporate Report 2020 lies in the addition of a chapter dedicated to corporate social responsibility. This focuses on the efforts the Bank has made in the field of CSR not only as a central bank, but also as supervisory authority for the economic and financial sector and as a company. As the Bank’s Governor Pierre Wunsch said: “We assume our social responsibilities in all the roles that we take on: as an employer and as an enterprise but also as the supervisory authority and the central bank in the service of the country. We were already doing that in the past, but mainly behind the scenes and without much publicity. Nonetheless, we concluded that we need to be transparent about the recent radical modernisation of the National Bank’s CSR policy. We want the population to be able to gain a better idea of the initiatives we are taking and our action in that sphere.”

What is the National Bank doing to help with sustainable development and climate change? What kind of diversity and inclusion policy does it have? Did this policy have any impact on recruitment in 2020? Does the Bank apply sustainability criteria to its own investment portfolios? How is it reducing its CO2 emissions and its use of paper? The chapter on CSR provides some answers to these questions among many others.